boonhet@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Meanwhile, Telia in Estonia: “The Estonian customer doesn’t prioritize connection speeds or prices, that’s why we don’t need to offer competitive speed/price ratios compared to what we have in other European countries”
ZiemekZ@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Seems surprising, especially because Estonia is known for its digitized government. I logically thought that it’d be complemented with decent Internet coverage.
boonhet@lemm.ee 2 months ago
We have roughly the same problem that the US has, where they’ve paid the big ISPs to put fiber everywhere and all that money got pocketed. Well, Estonia’s first few big fiber projects were all through Telia. Telia put down way less fiber than promised and constantly kept saying the lines were already all committed so they couldn’t rent it out to competitors.
This I believe started before we even had Telia here - We had Eesti Telekom, later known as Elion, and then finally it was acquired by Telia. The same company has had a semi-monopolistic status pretty much all the time. Tele2 and Elisa exist, but they’ve never had the sweet ass contracts Telia’s always had.
This is slowly starting to change with the currently ongoing broadband project where you can get an ISP-neutral fiber connection installed for like 99€ or 199€, regardless of how much work it is to get the lines to you, but I’m not sure this is even available if you’ve already got Telia’s monopoly fiber installed. It’s very slow to roll out and every year or 2 they choose a bunch of municipalities with problematic Internet access and then if you live in one of those, you can apply. This has been a godsend, because it got me fiber at home, after years of only being able to get 12/1 mbps through Telia copper.